Video updates (various)

Today I let the videos speak:
First of all a nice FOSS bullet hell SHUMP, called Shumpacabra:



Taisei Project is maybe also relevant if you like getting killed ALOT (hehe, insider joke for q).

Previously mentioned Cube Trains (based on Frogatto) has reached version 1.0:



You can support the developer of this nice puzzle game by buying the Expansion-pack for 2 Canadian bucks or more! Another option to try and fund FOSS game development... maybe there will be some sales figures published at some point?

Next on the list: open-source engine reimplementation project Corsix-th:



You will need the original game for the non-free artworks though.

And last but not least: 0 A.D. got a brand new website: www.play0ad.com! Celebrating this they also made some nice video tutorials for total beginners:



Have a look at tutorial 2 and tutorial 3 also.

Signing off :)

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Cry for programming help!

Ok, we don't normally do these kind of recruitment posts (don't send us emails about that!), but for the following two FOSS game gems we will make an exception (and it is officially sanctioned by our boss Charlie ;) ).

So which ones do I mean? Well these:

Link to homepage; example video

Link to homepage; example video

In recent months both games have stalled in development and people are starting to become quite pessimistic about the future (1,2).

Strangely enough (for typical FOSS projects) it is not the artists who lack (there is actually an active group of contributors for both games, who are eager to see their artwork in the game; examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, all CC-by-SA licensed) but a severe lack of programmers.

An example of not yet implemented OD graphics

So how can you help out and dig into the code, and why am I posting about both games the same time? Well both are actually build on a somewhat similar base, utilizing OGRE3D for graphics and CEGUI for the GUI elements. Now I have to admit, given my very much lacking C++ skills, I am aware that that is probably where the similarities end, but have a look at their developers pages (1, 2) and source-code yourself if you are interested.

Now why would one want to merge the code-base of two completely different games (the one being a strategy game, the other an ARPG)? Well surprisingly enough they would complement each other quite well, with a similar theme and the nice prospect of using the OD mechanics also as an in-game editor (which is really lacking for SumWars).

In addition to that it would open up the possibility of a really cool multiplayer/COOP game mode as I explained here. This comic sums up the idea (minus the Wii-U):

Copyright: Penny Arcade

So warm up your OGRE3D coding skills and give these projects some help, preferably including a merger! THANKS in advance!

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D3 BFG source drop, and new hosted forum

Hot off the press is the news that id software has released the source-code to their Doom3 remastered BFG edition. Have a look at the code here. It seems like Mr. Carmack has back-ported a few nifty things from idTech5, so this is potentially quite useful for upcoming idtech4 based FOSS games.

In unrelated news, I am happy to report that we are now hosting the forums for the nice off-road racing game StuntRally. Join the discussion here.

Old StuntRally screenshot, too lazy to find another right now ;)

One of the really awesome features of that game is the track-editor by the way... have a look at some awesome video tutorials here. Given the Techno-style music in these and the awesome spline-based tracks, I actually think that a WipeOut like modification of this game would really rock, join the discussion I started on that here :D

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0 A.D. and Megaglest updates

Some assorted news from the FOSS RTS thematic area.

First of all, Megagest saw another somewhat bigger release (3.7.x), and someone also made a nice cinematic for them:

Sadly no news on the planned graphical update, as the merger with GAE seems on hold, but the new version adds a lot of nice usability enhancements.

Much more active on the graphics front is 0 A.D. on the other hand. In their recent development update #9 they talk about completely switching to their new shader based renderer, and the guy behind these renderer improvements recently gave a short interview too.

Some other interesting news include this recent forum posts of some modders trying to switch to the 0 A.D. engine for their modern warfare RTS called Rogue Republic.
Asset integration seems to work already as you can see here:

Rogue Republic assets in O A.D.

The thread over at the 0 A.D. forums has a few additional details, but no significant info on the FOSS status they are aiming at in regards to their media.
Never the less, it looks like it might become a RTS project to follow more closely.

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Cinematic ZeroK trailer

Busy for a while moving... and the crickets take over FreeGamer it seems *chirp* *chirp* :D
Anyways, I am partially back in business, so a warm HELLO from East Africa!!!

So nothing much to report right now, except that there is a really nice cinematic trailer available for the FOSS RTS ZeroK (which is based on the Spring engine):

They also released a new version not all that long ago, so give it a try if you haven't so far.

Stay tuned, as I struggle to get into my regular FOSS-Games blogging habit again ;)

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Open-source head-tracking

So unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the new VR-google craze soon to hit every hard-core gamers cave (e.g. Occulus Rift). We talked about the FOSS engine getting Occulus support before, and now that id software promised to release the Doom3 BFG Edition source code too, it looks like VR in FOSS games will become quite common soon.

However, hidden in the (flight-)sim genre another quite nice system has been developed, using only a (sufficient frames per second) webcam:

The video is shot with FlightGear, everyones favorite open-source flight-sim. More details how to get it running with FlightGear can be found here, the system itself is not FlightGear specific though.

The source-code can be found here to be adapted to to your game (any 3D game that doesn't require too fast head-movement is basically suitable). The face-tracking is based on OpenCV, which will take some juice from your idling quad-core CPUs ;)

Less resource demanding are infrared LED tracker version, which do not need to follow a face and also work rather nicely in a dark room. For those, some propitiatory solutions have been available for some time, but you can also find Linux compatible open-source code for such a system here (instructions for FlightGear here).

Personally I was always to lazy to build myself a proper 3 dot LED cap, so I think the face tracking solutions are more convenient. If you are into non-FOSS games on the Windows platform, I can thus also recommend the partial open-source FaceTrackNoIR software, which supports quite a few really nice flight-sims, racing games and even FPS.

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Force: Leashed - GPL First-Person Gravity Not-Like-Portal

Force: Leashed is a free first person gravity fiddler. To advance, you need to guide rockets to their targets using spherical potential fields. And no, it's not like Portal. That much.

Force: Leashed was started as one of the 2012 7DFPS prototypes. It is based on GPL-licensed Darkplaces which for example also powers Xonotic.

Force: Leashed is available for free download for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows from its website.

The art asset license status is unknown. Watch this tweet for further information.

Video: Force: Leashed Gameplay

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Major Unvanquished update (Alpha 8)

UPDATE: Here is a nice video of the (Note: Alpha) gameplay:

Yesterday (following their monthly release cycle) a new alpha from Unvanqished was released. For those with bad short term memory: Unvanquished is trying to revitalize the RTS/FPS hybrid Tremulous.

New Unvanquished human player and weapon model

Besides the changes already mentioned previously, they have also replaced some more weapon models and now also have a really nice new webpage!

Still lots of things to do... but big thumbs up for the progress so far!

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LinWarrior 3D September news 2012

video: LinWarrior September 2012 git gameplay status

A word from the developer of LinWarrior 3D:

In the past weeks I've been working on some of the last changes to clean up the guts inside the mech class by moving everything to components and systems.
That includes a component for sounds that should eventually enable foot steps.
Of course some special cases still remain for later cleanup (like the jump jet light).
Some possible experiment-branch directions I see now are these:

• Persistence (savegames dude) using sqlite

• Reworking the Input to have events consumed by systems/components (or passing abstractions of SDL events).

• Some relaxing modeling work and integration of some more models

• Extending Physics to support tracked and wheeled vehicles - just talking about slanting on sloped ground by having 4 particles for wheels.

Multithreading would be possible, and easy with the system/component approach now but it isn't a top priority I think.
Easy because the execution model is working in phases, one sub-system at a time with no immediate communication between subsystems.

- hc on the forums

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Torque 3D engine liberated

The people behind the always very indi friendly and well renowned commercial Torque 3D engine announced a fews weeks ago that they will release the quite fully featured engine and tool-box under the very liberal and FOSS MIT license.

Well, and today they made an release announcement and opened up their repositories!

Some of you might remember the engine from the good old days of Tribes 2, but as you can see it has advanced quite a bit since then. Sadly it also lost its Linux and MacOS ports along the way, which is something the creators hope to have restored more quickly in the open-source version. Other show-stoppers on non-Windows platforms are a few remaining to be removed propitiatory qt-lib in the editor framework and so on. So if you think you can help them with either or those problems, have a look at their git repo here (click on "zip" to download you local copy).

Hmm... what does that mean for the FOSS gamer (besides some commercial game ports to Linux probably soon)? Well Torque is a really good tool-set to create new FOSS games, and they really tried to keep the entry barrier low, which is something that sadly can not be said for most other FOSS 3D engines. So in the longer run there might be some cool new games utilizing it. But for now I hope to see a fully FOSS version of this little gem soon ;)

As always... we will keep you updated with our irregular posts ;)

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Shorts: FreeOrion 0.4.1 and Xonotic Vehicle Gameplay

FreeOrion

image: Moving a fleet around in FreeOrion

video: FreeOrion testplay (best viewed at 720p HD)

FreeOrion 0.4.1 has been released a month ago. There still is no manual ship combat mode and there is a certain sluggishness regarding GUI responsiveness but the beautiful audio and graphics and consistent writing are definitely worth a try.

You can check out a preview of current 3d ship combat tech demo in this video (7m30s in).

Xonotic

image: Sniping a Hovercraft on Unsealed Trial 2 in Xonotic (more screens)

video: Unsealed Trial 2 Vehicle CTF longplay

I have been playing Xonotic on the [MoN] Vehicle Gameplay server and quite enjoying it lately. Just recently, a first version of Unsealed Trial 2 (screenshots) has been released there.

Some helpful vote commands:
vcall timelimit 600 (for when the time is draining too quickly)
vcall gotomap unseal (for when you realize that Unsealed Trial is the only playable map ;) )

If you'd like to record your own videos, all you need to know is on Xonotic's Democapture wiki page.

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Shorts: LambdaCube + StuntCarRacer, Naval Warfare, 0 A.D. Alpha 11

video: StuntCarRacer/LambdaCube 3D demo

StuntCarRacer (last release 2006) got re-born as a demo for LambdaCube 3D, a Haskell-based rendering engine.

video: Naval Warfare Test

Naval Warfare is a game in progress being made at Universidade de Bras�lia, using Gear2D (Linux/Windows).

image: celtic settlement in 0 A.D.

0 A.D. Alpha 11 got released.

Some of these news have been powered by SourceForge's ability to sort games by update date.

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Intergalactic news (new Red Eclipse version)

Somewhat related to the previous blog post (don't forget to vote to give a VR kit to the Cube2 developers), I can bring you the news that you can now download a new release (1.3 Galactic Edition) of Red Eclipse. By the words of the developers this is mostly a bugfix release:

This release sees a semi-stabilisation of the gameplay in favour of implementing a variety of bugfixes and user requests. We've removed some old cruft and implemented a few new game types to replace them, like coop (humans fight high powered bots), and king-of-the-hill (control and defend one flag). Due to the popularity of the impulse/parkour system we have introduced a new "impulse vaulting", where you can hold down your parkour key to "vault" over low obstacles, making it that much easier to navigate around busy levels.

But you can read up on the full changelog in the release thread on our forums. Oh and maybe you can help them out and create a new teaser video for their website?

On our forums I was also recently reminded of a Red Eclipse based mod called MekArcade (see more infos on their Moddb site), which as you can guess adds Mechs to the game.

Some MekArcade mechs

Information is otherwise relatively sparse (I couldn't find any word on their media license for example... but given RE's CC-By-SA licensing scheme I hope they sticked to the same), but they plan to release a first version relatively soon (Maybe they waited for the RE 1.3 release?).
The screenshots released so far look quite nice also and first released video gives off a Mechwarrior like vibe too, so I guess I am looking forward to their first release ;)

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OpenMW 0.17.0: Changes and Freedom(!?)

video: OpenMW v. 0.17.0 Commentary

The OpenMW engine re-implementation for proprietary RPG classic Morrowind brings fixes, a pause menu, camera modes and proper player control, potion usage, drain/fortify dynamic stats/attributes magic effects and other changes in release 0.17.0.


Work has also begun on an Editor and The Example Suite.

A Free-as-in-Freedom OpenMW game?

The Example Suite is going to be a small standalone game that does not contain any Bethesda owned art assets. Therefore, even those who do not own Morrowind will be able to play with OpenMW and test it.

The project uses the "Release early and often" mantra and so hopefully we will have an early build available for download soon.

If you can help with; skills in animating, music, sounds, modeling or are an experience modder please visit The Example Suite forum.

An editor for OpenMW!

The OpenMW Editor is necessary in order to implement the post 1.0 features that the original Morrowind engine isn't capable of. It's currently a one man project and he could use some help. Visit the OpenMW Editor forum.

Additional links:

• OpenMW Homepage
• Download
• Roadmap

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Unvanquished development news

I have to apologize for the recent lack in FG updates, but at least *I* have a good excuse as first my Internet broke down, and now I am preparing to relocate to another continent (extra points for guessing which in the comments ;) ).

Anyways... it seems like there is now a "winner" out of the total breakdown and split-up of the efforts to revitalize Tremulous earlier this year. I will not go into details, but I can assure you it was not pretty, and I decided to skip any news coverage on it until the dust had settled.
I hope this is now the case, and for now it seems only one of the projects really shows some progress... that is unless the other is not working in stealth mode.

Lets see... at least Unvanquished is actually releasing alphas of their game, so I am leaning toward them when it comes to which will actually become a nice, playable game soon.

You can follow development quite well on one of the team-member's blog here. In the most recent post, some nice screenshots surfaced, and both their new modeling, GUI and animation work seems quite nice too.

Unvanquished: Human base preparing for an attack

Anyways, check out the other cool news from them, and maybe try one of their recent alphas... however don't expect a fully refurbished Tremulous yet.

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Also out of Beta: Annex:CTW Release 3

We are a bit late to the party (partially due to my current German Telekom induced Internet abstinence at home :( ), but last month the first stable release of Annex: Conquer the World was released.




For those out of the loop: Annex is a so called total conversion mod (albeit standalone) of Megaglest. You can read up on its development and the latest news in their forum post on the MG forums.

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War�ow 1.0 released

Yesterday the long awaited version 0.7  1.0 was released and thus after 7 years of development War�ow has gone out of beta.

For those out of the loop, here is a short description of it by the developers:

Warsow is a fast paced, deathmatch game. It has your classic things like bunny hopping, rocket jumping, and general mayhem. There's many game modes, including, Bomb & Defuse, CTF, Instagib, and the classic 1v1 Duel.

You can see the full changelog (including many nice screenshots) here, and if you want to give it a try, head over to their download page.

They also made a nice release trailer:



For those wondering, there is some discussion here with War�ow developers trying to justify their decision to keep the art assets non-free and why there isn't a open source-code repository.
Personally I am not convinced, but at least they release their engine code and promise to keep the overall game always freeware...

However besides that, it's a fun FPS! So try some crazy parcour-like moves yourself ;)

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AlienArena reloaded edition

The PR machine behind AlienArena seems to have found out by rigorous focus-group testing and public surveying, that a re-branding of the idtech2 based arena FPS, was in order...
But here on the uncompromising last resort of free and unbiased game journalism we call it what it is: a nice new release, bumping the version number to 7.60; because as you should know... a higher number is always better :p

New alien spider bots!

Obviously it wasn't just the number that changed, and the list of engine, art and gameplay improvements is actually quite impressive for this release.
Another thing they updated is their website (the old one was quite horrible), and while this is a open-source game only by its engine code and sadly not media, I really like their new slogan:

Open Sourced. Ever Evolving.

Which has a certain ring to it ;)

Speaking of PR efforts, there is now a dedicated PR team for War�ow and the long awaited 0.7 release is slowly moving forward and you can see (incl. many nice screenshots) what kind of changes you can expect here.

Screenshot from the War�ow 0.7 changelog thread

There is also an BETA release of the version 0.7 (which according to standard version naming schemes should be a beta itself I guess ;) ) which can be downloaded here.

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Open Source Game Summer Screen Shorts 2012 #2

Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a BSD-code/CC-BY-NC-SA-art Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG(?). There are still a few hours left to contribute to additional features.

Sintel: The Game, currently completely CCBY3-licensed, just had their first alpha release! They have original voice acting and all! (Although I did not manage to get it running on Linux yet).

Irrlicht-based cute Puzzle Moppet has been released under the WTFPL and I was able to replace all non-free textures and sounds. Now all we need is a repository coordinator.

Valyria Tear is a continuation of the jRPG Hero of Allacrost project with an active development blog.

Frogatto is a well-designed-code, beautiful-proprietary-pixel-art platformer. The developers started "making friends" on their blog by talking about projects they like.

idTech3 was reviewed in an extensive, illustrated article.

Summoning Wars, a 3d-visuals hack'n'slash needs a new lead developer.

A discussion about OpenGameArt's usability for game developers started on their forums. Improvements were recently added to the texture section and this is a chance to formulate enhancement to the other sections.

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OverDose now officially... hmm?... open-source?

Somehow I was under the impression that the team behind Overdose had realized some time ago that by using the idTech2 base they would be bound to the GPL licensing requirements, and abandoned plans to buy a separate license just to keep the code closed... however that was never officially announced until now:

This now means that OverDose is totally open, totally moddable, and totally complete with its own mod tools, which include level compilers, map editors, font tools, custom HD .RoQ video compilers, texture compression tools, model format tools� Lets just say, a decent package of tools with a fully written SDK and developer wiki. So you don�t just get the game source code, you get the full shebang, everything. Of course media still belongs to OverDose, but the above should be great news to any mod people or budding game makers.
Whats more, the code is available� Right now! Get in touch at odium@team-blur-games.com for a link to the codebase which is constantly updated! Any budding coders out there who want to be part of the OverDose team be sure to get in touch, we always, ALWAYS need more coders ;)

In their recent news they also mention that they have realized that keeping the source closed doesn't help against hackers (a realization that comes better late then never :) ) and that their updated (GTK-Radiant based) level-editor is now available. That they add all their other (AFAIK Windows only) tools into the open-source mix too is an unexpected but very nice bonus!

Some recent automatic foliage tests

I assume by asking for code access they will point you to the "hidden" repository here, but giving them some positive feedback by asking for it, will probably be the "right thing"tm to do ;)

Oh and don't miss the long WIP thread with some nice (but over post-processed) screens here.

WIP weapon model

Last but not least: To avoid sounding too negative *again*, I think this is a great development and this could become a really nice open-source modding platform, specially if they make at least a base set of assets available under a more liberal license *hint* ;) So show them some support by helping out or maybe donating.

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